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A video of a swarm of ants circling a speaker playing AC/DC has gone viral on TikTok and Instagram, garnering over 124 million views in just two days. The video, posted on Gabriel Benício's TikTok page on January 24, 2024, has many people speculating whether the footage was real or just a cleverly edited gimmick.
In the original video posted on TikTok, a colony of ants can be seen circling a blue JBL speaker as the speaker blasts the electrifying guitar riffs of the AC/DC song Thunderstruck. The video received over 15.8 million likes and 134.6k comments on TikTok while this article was written.
While the video went viral on social media, it was proved to be fake and is a brilliantly crafted work of CGI by the original poster, Gabriel Benício. In a separate TikTok video, the editor showcased how he created the original video using his masterful editing techniques.
While the viral video is a fake, the phenomenon duplicated in the video does indeed exist in nature. Dubbed the "death spiral," this video replicates ants' instinct to go around in circles once they are knocked off their course.
The viral TikTok video is a fake, but it is based on the ants' death spiral phenomenon
According to Metro, the first known phenomenon of an ant death spiral was recorded by animal psychologist T C Schneirla in the 1930s. As we all know, ants are colonial creatures. They live in large colonies and seldom seek independence, preferring to move together.
Ants are also creatures that track food via scent and not sight. And, as insects that thrive in colonies, they usually follow the leader's pheromone trail as they forage for food. Sometimes, the leader gets knocked off course and can veer from the path. Separated from their leader, the ants start circling.
Once a complete circle is formed, the ants continue to follow one another in this death spiral, but this time in an endless loop. They continue this behavior till, as the name suggests, they die of exhaustion. These outlier insects that are trapped in the death spiral form what is called an ant mill.
It is not yet fully understood why ants exhibit this behavior, which has fascinated and stumped scientists for many years.
Studies show that fake news travels faster than real news on social media
It can be hard to judge what is true and what isn't on the internet. Social media can sometimes be a cesspool of misinformation.
According to Science.org, Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, put together a team to research why fake news spreads faster than real news on social media following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
The scientists who conducted this study on Twitter realized that tweets with false information were more "novel and elicited different emotional responses" from people. According to the study, the novelty compounded with the emotional upheaval seemed to be what's generating more retweets.
This is not the first time a fake video has gone viral. In May 2023, a video of a man pulling a giant lawn worm from someone's drain went viral on TikTok. Another fake video that went viral was a video of two bees working together to unscrew a soda bottle cap in 2021.
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